_ CHAPTER XXXV. ANNIE ANSWERS
All at once Annie Squires, usually stolid, now overstrained, gave way to a wild sobbing. "I can't go in there," said she. "I'm scared. I want to go home! I want my mother, that's what I want."
"Where is your mother?" asked Wid Gardner. He had come over near to her when Doctor Barnes was helping Mary into the house.
"Dead--dead long ago," wept Annie. "When I was a little girl. Like her, Mary, there--we didn't neither of us ever have a mother. We done just the best we could, both of us. We've tried and tried to find some sort of place where we belonged, and we couldn't. We haven't got any place to go to. I haven't got a place on earth to call my home.
"And it's something a woman wants sometimes," she added after a while, dabbing her wet handkerchief against her eyes. "That's the Gawd's truth."
Wid approached more closely the weeping girl, touching her arm with a brown hand now gentle as a child's.
"Now look-a-here," said he. "I can't stand to hear you go on that way. Do you reckon you was ever any lonesomer fer a home than what I am, living out here all my life?"
"And now I'm worse off than I ever was before," he went on frowningly. "I didn't know nothing before you come out here. But now I do. I can't think of your going back, Annie."
She did not answer him, but went on weeping.
"What's more, I ain't
a-going to stand it," he added savagely. "I ain't
a-going to let you go back a-tall. Talk about home!--there's a home right acrosst the fence. We can make it any way we like. It'll do to start with, anyhow. Here's where you belong--you don't belong back there in them dirty cities. You belong right out here--with me."
"I couldn't--I can't," said Annie. "I couldn't let her go back alone. I got to take care of that kid."
"She ain't blind no more," said Wid. "But she don't have to go back! This here place where we stand is hers, ain't it? What more does she want? And we'd be right here, too, all the time, to help her and watch her, wouldn't we, now?"
"You don't know her," said Annie Squires. "I do."
"But, Annie," he went on, "you'd ought to see this out here in the valley when the spring comes! It's green, all green! The sage has got five different colors of green in it--you wouldn't think that, would you? And some blue. And you ain't seen the mountains yet when they're white with snow on them--that's something you got to see fer to know what a mountain is. And look at that little creek--it's plumb gentle up here, ain't it? It's pretty, here. You ought to see the moonlight on the meadows when the moon is full,--I was telling you about that, Annie."
"I ain't never been married in my life," he went on, arguing now. "I ain't never seen a woman that I loved or looked at twicet but you. I was too damn lazy to care anyway about anything till I seen you. I just been drifting and fooling along. But now I ain't. I want to go to work. I want to be somebody. Why, Annie, I reckon all the time I was homesick, and didn't know it. But I tell you it wouldn't be no home unless you was in it with me. I ain't fit to ask you to run it fer me. But I do!"
It was the ancient story, even told direct in the open, unwhispered, even told now, at such an hour and place. She did not answer at all, but her sobbing had ceased. He stood still frowning, looking at her, his hat pushed back from his forehead.
"I can't say no more'n I have," he concluded. "Years and years, Annie. Wouldn't it settle a heap of things?"
"I got to have some sort of time to think things over, haven't I, then?" She spoke with apparent venom, as though this were an affront that had been offered her.
"All you want," said Wid Gardner gently. "I've done my own thinking. I know."
"I've got to go in and get them folks something to eat, haven't I?" said Annie, using her apron on her eyes. "It's going to be about the last time all of us'll ever eat together any more."
"Well, we can invite them over, sometimes, can't we, Annie?" said Wid Gardner calmly. And he kissed her brazenly and in the open. _